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Friday, September 29, 2006

Just to let folks know I'll be reading some poems of mine at the Warwick Words Festival next weekend, on Saturday 7th October.

It won't be a lengthy reading as it takes place in the Thomas Oken Tea Rooms next to Warwick Castle and is part of the 'Poetry Cafe' which is running there throughout the Festival. If you're in or around Warwick next Saturday and would like to hear me read - and maybe stick around afterwards and say hi - then I'd be pleased to see you there.

The reading should take place between 1.30 - 2pm and is free, though their tea and scones probably won't be. There'll be other local poets performing or reading their work all that day and on Thursday and Friday too, if you're interested in coming along for the whole Festival.

For more information on all the other workshops and poetry/literary events available that weekend, try the Warwick Words website.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

I have just, whilst trying to avoid writing my novel, found this great website at www.literature-map.com where you type in the name of a favourite author and the website will instantly generate the names of other authors read by people who like that author's books. It sounds a little dull, put like that - it's not, damn it! - but just go and try.

Personally, I think it's rather cool, especially the way the names sort of starburst and jiggle about on the page as they spread further and further away from the original named author. It's like a bomb going off and the bits flying everywhere. But in slow motion. And without hurting anyone. Hard to explain, better just go see what I mean - here's the link: www.literature-map.com.

Friday, September 15, 2006

Here are some forthcoming performance dates for the autumn launch of BOUDICCA & CO., to be updated nearer the time. Please see the News page on my website for full details.

Copies of my new poetry collection BOUDICCA & CO. should be available at most of these events, but if you want one and can't make it to a reading, you can buy it online at a discount by visiting Salt Publishing.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

My youngest started nursery school for the first time this week. She looks so cute in her little outfit - sparkling clean for once - and Bang-on-the-Door bag. (Which is apparently a lunch bag rather than a school bag proper, but I've never been terribly good at getting these minor details right. A bag is a bag is a bag, right?)

Anyway, here she is, never to be the same again, bursting with cuteness and first-day-at-schoolness. Those other kids won't know what hit them ...

Sunday, September 03, 2006

I've been trying to place this poem of mine, entitled 'Apples", for over a year now. It takes months to get replies from most poetry magazines, of course, but all the same, I do love this particular poem and am really quite disappointed that none of the editors I tried took a shine to it. Though perhaps I like it too much and therefore can't see if or where it fails as a piece of writing. Or maybe the editors just weren't the right type for this poem. Whatever.

There is perhaps an air of late fifties and early sixties' nostalgia about this poem, as if it had come straight out of that era, and perhaps it did, in a way, with echoes of other famous poems about horses written about that time. It has an unusually gentle and domestic feel to it, which is rather out of step with many of the poems I've written over the past ten years.

Maybe I'm mellowing at last ...

Anyway, 'Apples" will be published soon enough in my new poetry collection, BOUDICCA & CO., due out from Salt in a few months' time - which basically means I can't submit it to a magazine now, with book publication so close at hand. So I'm posting the poem up here on my blog instead, with this photograph of last year's apples in my own back garden to accompany it.

Enjoy!

Apples

The horses come here for apples twice a day,nudging the fence and rubbing themselvesagainst trees, trampling earth with their hunters’ hooves while they wait.At first we fed them with palms held flat,away from the substantial teeth and those warm brownish lips lifting up to reveal them.But one always dropped his appleinto white-flowered nettles under the fenceand the other would stoop to retrieve it, thick sinewy neck suppleas a giraffe’s. So now we roll them into the field or throw them, over-arm, so they bounceand split soft apple everywhere. Some days the children are outside playing and I lift them up, let the baby grab at a sleek nose with her clumsy fingerswhile the boys stare, mesmerisedby the moist brown eyes and those lashes -like false ones! - seductively curling.The gentler one comes on his own sometimes,whinnying and snuffling at the fence.He turns a wide circle under the horse-chestnutbefore moving on, applesjust out of reach and no one in the garden.

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The Queen's Secret: Victoria Lamb

Published Autumn 2012

That's the kind of poet Jane Holland is, a superb thinker-ahead, a person who always knows where the poem is going to go, even before the poem has been written; and that's not in any reductive way, that's in a way that makes you raise your fist and go YESSSS!'

Ian McMillan, Poetry Review

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Fun Tudor Fiction for Kids

Stories for Kindle or your computer, written by an eight year old.

"If Jane Holland didn't exist it would be necessary for us to invent her."

And those who saw/raw light ...

Kissing the Pink

Boudicca & Co. (Salt Publishing)

The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman

My first poetry collection (Bloodaxe, 1996) out of print but still available from me. Alternatively a revised Second Edition exists as an ebook on Amazon entitled "Disreputable".

'Jane Holland's Boudicca & Co is a book of adventurous, resonant inventions. As the title suggests, it offers a new view from the interior - of both country and psyche - in which history and geography are co-opted in effortless interplay. It's a work of synthesis, and of poetic and emotional maturity, in which Holland emerges as a true craftswoman, a supple and graceful thinker with an effortless grasp of line, at the heart of the English lyric tradition.'

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On Warwick Castle: a "modernist pièce de résistance" (David Morley) and "one of the more ambitious works of public poetry generated through a local laureateship" (David Floyd, Sphinx 10). Available to buy from Amazon and Nine Arches Press.

Matt Merritt on Jane Holland's LAMENT OF THE WANDERER: 'an original and moving re-imagining of one of the great works of medieval literature.'

Available as a chapbook with Introduction from Heaventree Press, or in CAMPER VAN BLUES (Salt Publishing, 2008).

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Boudicca & Co: 'I reached the fourth section of the book, the Boudicca sequence, and everything went electric ... There's a touch of Vicki Feaver about the violence and the cool delight in blood and innards, but the work is quite distinctive ... I was dashing from poem to poem, completely compelled.'

Helena Nelson, Ambit 2007

Praise for Boudicca & Co

'Extremely powerful and varied ... Holland has both the clarity for the reader and the mastery of language to say what she means in a way that makes the brain tingle with both shock and pleasure ... This collection is outstanding.'

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Before the Wrinkles but After the Gregory

'... we need only compare Holland's work with the anti-war 'poetry' of Harold Pinter to gain some indication of how rich and rewarding her response to modern conflict is - by shifting methods towards the imaginative and narrative elements of poetry, rather than the rhetorical and political. In this sense, the 'Boudicca' sequence has a great deal in common with David Harsent's Legion, which represents a similar attempt by a non-combatant poet to engage intelligently with the realities of war. This is, frankly, an outstanding collection, and Holland, as a result, can now count herself amongst the front rank of contemporary British poets.'

Pollard on 'Boudicca'

"Boudicca & Co. is a bold re-imagining of Britishness. Steeped in myth and medieval poetry, this is a land of 'ruins under rain,' hares, oaks, gargoyles and the Green Man. At the heart of it, embodying both Britain's fierce beauty and its bloodied past, is Boudicca, and her voice is a startling achievement: modern, pitch-black, funny, and yet hauntingly lyrical."

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Nearby 'Old Nun Wood'

'There are limitations associated with female poets' espousal of the lyric 'I' ... If it is even able to move beyond the specifically personal and individual, it is only allowed to become the voice of a female collectivity.'